BudgetLens is a full-stack budgeting and expense tracking web application designed to help users manage spending, organize shopping lists, and track financial habits in one centralized platform.
The platform combines budgeting tools, receipt scanning/OCR functionality, and collaborative shopping list management to improve financial visibility and simplify expense tracking.
- HTML5
- CSS3
- JavaScript
- PHP
- MySQL
- Tesseract OCR
- Google Gemini API
- Git/GitHub
- XAMPP
- Users create budgets and spending categories
- Expense data is stored in MySQL tables
- Receipts are uploaded and processed using OCR
- Extracted transaction data is parsed and categorized
- The dashboard displays spending summaries and budget progress
- User authentication and session management
- Budget creation and spending limit tracking
- Expense categorization
- OCR-based receipt scanning
- Shopping list management
- Nested list organization
- Dashboard analytics and financial summaries
- Responsive UI layouts
One of the biggest challenges during development was integrating OCR functionality for receipt scanning. Handling inconsistent text extraction and formatting required multiple debugging iterations and preprocessing adjustments.
This project also strengthened my understanding of:
- backend/frontend integration
- relational database structure
- debugging workflows
- Git collaboration and merge conflict resolution
- organizing scalable project structures
- React frontend migration
- Data visualization dashboards
- AI-powered spending insights
- Shared collaborative budgeting
- Mobile responsiveness improvements
- Cloud deployment
(Coming soon!)